Thread by @RohanIrvine

The next presenter is @StylianaSarris — The Behavioural Psychology Underpinning Addictive Technology

#uxaustralia2020

What Styliana will will cover

Foundations of Behaviourism

Thoughts and feelings are impossible to observe.

Instead we should observe how an operants environment affects how they react.

Back in the 30's B.F Skinner wanted to prove that we could manipulate the environment to change behaviour.

He observed through rewards and punishment he came up with his operant conditioning model.

He concluded that if you understand the box you can understand the behaviour and if you design the right box you can design the behaviour.

Styliana is now showing that we can view the world through the lends of boxes within boxes.

Layers:
Individual
Immediate Relationship
Institutions
Macrosystems we live within

Technology sits above all of this.

It is a skinner box of completely new magnitude that is not bounded to countries.

As designers of these experience we design behaviours.

So what happens when we design addiction?

Filters in apps have had a huge detrimental affect on body dysmorphia.

You can schedule the reinforcement

Continuous: Every time the interaction occurs — too much dopamine has an adverse effect.

The more unpredictable the reward the more engaging it is.

Intermittent Reinforcement is what works best as a reward mechanism.

Designing for microsessions

You want to assessed the frequency of user engagement rather than the length of time someone is in the experience.

Remove distractor stimuli to clearly connect a behaviour to a reward when you're training a behaviour.

A combination of blending reinforcement schedules is best practice.

How do you apply this theory in the right way?

Define right from wrong in a contextual way.

Ask yourself what behaviour are you designing?

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